Animatronic Puppet Takes Cues From Animation Software

Lip syncing for computer animated characters has long been simplified. You draw a set of lip shapes for vowels and other sounds your character makes and let the computer interpolate how to go from one shape to the next. But with physical, real world puppets, all those movements have to be done manually, frame-by-frame. Or do they?

He toyed around with a number of approaches for making the lip mechanism before coming up with one that worked the way he wanted. The lips are shaped using guitar wire soldered to other wires going to servos further back in the head. Altogether there are four servos for the lips and one more for the jaw. There isn’t much sideways movement but it does enough and lets the brain fill in the rest.

On the software side, he borrows heavily from the tools used for lip syncing computer-drawn characters. He created virtual versions of the five servo motors in Adobe Animate and manipulates them to define the different lip shapes. Animate then does the interpolation between the different shapes, producing the servo positions needed for each frame. He uses an AS3 script to send those positions off to an Arduino. An Arduino sketch then uses the Firmata library to receive the positions and move the servos. The result is entirely convincing as you can see in the trailer below. We’ve also included a video which summarizes the iterations he went through to get to the finished Billy Whiskers or just check out his detailed website.

Beautifull! Always admired the patience and perseverance that goes into this style of filmmaking. Well done and great to see how the puppet was created as you normally don’t get to see this and easily forget the details that are required for getting it look natural. Nice to see that electronics can make somethings a little bit easier by partial automation.

Awesome work. Love stop animation. Where’s the crazy psychotic mouse that impaled the human with a gardening trowel?? Maybe a squirrel if only to get away from an overused paradigm. Ask any cat or dog and both would agree that squirrel are evil. Damn overgrown tree rats. Would have kept mark 1 head for a background character.